The Register's Editorial: Iowa should reassess need for juvenile home

Is a 27-acre campus with 13 buildings the best way to care for 54 troubled youths?

Jul. 29, 2013

Mark Day, interim superintendent of the Iowa Juvenile Home/Girls State Training School, is pictured inside an isolation unit at the school in Toledo. Some children who were living long term in isolation at the home were reportedly denied individualized instruction. / Register File Photo

Written by

The Register’s Editorial

The Iowa Juvenile Home in Toledo housed three girls in concrete block cells for months at a time, depriving them of interaction and education. It’s unknown how many other youths have been kept in isolation there. Yet Gov. Terry Branstad says his staff assured him the problems had been addressed. He pointed to a change in leadership at the home. The new director says he’s focused on moving forward.

Truly moving forward requires rethinking the very existence of the Iowa Juvenile Home. Does this facility have a place in the 21st century?

The state purchased the site in Toledo in 1920 to use as an orphanage. Eventually, our nation moved away from institutionalizing children. Orphanages became obsolete. Family foster care emerged and private-sector services grew.

Government held onto the facility in Toledo anyway, redefining its mission as a state-run home for troubled youth. It not only remained open, Iowa spent $20 million on renovations just a few years ago.

Yet the home admitted only 54 youths in fiscal year 2012. Including court-ordered diagnostic evaluations and other services, it served a total of 136 children during the entire year.

Does Iowa need to maintain a facility with 27 acres and 13 buildings and 118 employees to serve so few youths? For 2014, the home’s total budget is $10.2 million, with 98 percent of that money coming from state and local funds. Last year, the director was paid $119,000 and some youth counselors were paid more than $60,000. (In the private sector, counselors with bachelor’s degrees regularly earn about half that much.)

There is no doubt the Iowa Juvenile Home serves some of Iowa’s most difficult kids. Many have lived in numerous other facilities before arriving in Toledo. Some have committed crimes. Because the state is obligated to help these youth, it may have no option but to maintain its own facility to serve them.

But should that facility cost $10 million? Could it be merged with another? Could the private-sector offer less expensive, high-quality programs and facilities to serve these youth? Is this the best use of public money?

These are the questions lawmakers should explore going forward.

They are the same kind of questions that have been asked about the four state-run mental health institutes in Cherokee, Clarinda, Independence and Mount Pleasant. Opened in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the mental health institutes were part of a national movement to institutionalize the mentally ill. At one point, the four facilities housed 6,000 residents.

Fortunately, the mental health profession, and the country, progressed. Today, the focus is on treating people with medications and helping them live in community settings. Now the four sprawling, aging campuses serve an average of a few hundred people per day. As the Register’s editorial board has previously written, a better option would be to have a single, centrally located facility to share resources, employ the best staff and serve the dwindling number of people seeking care in an institutional setting.

So why do such homes remain? Because any talk of mergers or closures is met with resistance from surrounding communities. State-run institutions are often among the largest and highest-paying employers in the rural communities where many of these are located. Elected officials focus more on that than whether the facilities make sense for treatment and taxpayers.

That attitude needs to change. Just because these institutions are part of Iowa’s history doesn’t automatically earn them a place in its future.